Monday, January 18, 2010

If you have been following along with my blog, you’ll know how much I love taxi drivers. Anyone less fortunate than the rest of us will usually transform into a taxi driver. Bare in mind, taxi drivers are a different race than human beings, due to their abnormal traits and despicable behavior.

I was fed up with normal taxis and there was a hype going on in Amman for this unique taxi. Why they saw this taxi to be difference between heaven and hell, whereas all I could see was a taxi painted in silver and with a larger fare, I do not know. Personally I don’t judge anyone or anything until I actually try it out.

Which is were we get to the story. My father, who takes me to school and returns me every day, decides to go back to Britain for business, it’s up to my mum to take me. I haven’t been to Britain for four years now and I think my friends forgot me from the first year, but that’s another story.

Now I would go and find a taxi, but at 6 am trying to find a taxi, when in the first place you live in the middle of nowhere and it would take a good half an hour to get to a main road, which in turn is filled with other people waiting for a taxi as well – I’m not doing any of that. I asked my mum to take me at first, but she is too busy and too tired, and she hates the caveman of a son I am in the first place. She says I’m a caveman because I grunt, I forage the fridge too much, and my room looks like a cave.

Personally, I don’t know what is tiring about driving. All you do is press the pedal and rotate the steering wheel a few degrees left or right. If I had a license I would drive myself. And, the tiredness of driving would compensate for having to walk in the cold for half an hour, wait for a taxi that wants to pick you up, bare with the taxis unfunny jokes, etc.

So my mum called the unique taxi, so it’d come at 7am. It came at 8am. This actually happened four or five times – what’s ridiculous is that each time the center would send us a new taxi with a new taxi driver; he’d get lost yet again, and arrive an hour late. What’s worse is that we corrected the address about six times, and each time it’d still be the incorrect address and he’d get lost again.

The taxi driver himself looks like he came out of the slums, except he’s wearing a uniform and actually shaved and showered – well most of them anyway. I thought they’d be a bit better than normal taxis, but I was wrong. They moan about how you came two minutes late even when he was an hour late, he moans about how you closed the door too hard or too soft, and he moans about how he has no idea were my school is.

One taxi driver was so bad that I was going to direct him, he feels insulted by this gesture and says he knows the place by heart – twenty minutes later he asks for directions. The so called navigator is a gimmick, all that gadget does on his dashboard is make an interesting popping sound when the screen is touched, so he annoyingly presses it multiple times just to show he has an expensive device that’s better than any of your devices. And to be honest, all he puts into his magical device is the time of the journey and where to and where from the journey is. Way to go.

Friday, December 4, 2009

I was riding with a taxi driver yesterday, and the strange person decides to convert his taxi into a public transport bus by stopping for two girls and loading them since they were supposedly on my journey route anyway.

So the girl in the back wants to smoke, after she takes out a cigarette and lights it, the driver says:

Driver: Smoking in the taxi is forbidden.Girl: But I've already lighted it.Driver: No please throw it out.Girl: I can open the window.Driver: No I have an infection in my lungs whenever I smell cigarette smoke.Girl: OK I'll throw it out.

Later on when the taxi drops off the girl, he takes out a pack of cigarettes from his glove compartment and lights a cigarette.

Me: I thought you had an infection in your lungs.Driver: (Chuckles to himself) Stupid girls.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

This is a photo I found buried in my fathers hard drive. My father keeps many photos dating back from 1998 on his hard drive and they move with him from a computer to another when he upgrades. I copied the entire photo folder and began looking through it.

Lots of memories came back from looking at ancient almost forgotten photos. Alot of them where from when I was in Britain before I came to Jordan. This photo was taken sometime back in 2005, on the last day of school in Britain.

Sports day in the UK is a day at the end of school when the entire school takes the day off of regular activities to participate in sports and games. Its one of the many missing parts of our educational system in Jordan. Below is another picture of me, but taken a few days ago. You can use it to see how things have moved along in about four or five years.